Shortly before Christmas, Wilbur Smith, the writer of airport novels, gave an interview to a Sunday newspaper in which he spoke of his four wives in the following tender terms: “Two of them died on me, the first one hates me, and this one loves me, so I’ve covered the whole spectrum.” He no longer saw his children, he added: “They’ve got my sperm, that’s all … it’s sadder for them than it is for me, because they’re not getting any more money.” Perhaps the most charitable response was to observe that at least Smith was being consistent here: the real people in his life seemed as two-dimensional, judging from these descriptions, as the typical Smith hero, who is a rugged outdoorsman with a passion for hunting, hard liquor, and no-strings sex. (Oh, and for avoiding the gaboon adder, the deadly African snake Smith calls upon, with amusing frequency, when a character needs to die.) But my sneering’s a bit hypocritical, really. I only know about Smith’s cardboard-cutout characters because 2015 was the year I read two of his brick-sized novels, along with several similar vast works by Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett: the kind of books, as one friend put it both succinctly and snobbily, that you find in self-catering holiday cottages. A further confession: mainly, I enjoyed them.
In publishing at large, it was a year of very long works: of Franzen and Knausgård and Marlon James, if you have some kind of problem with gaboon adders and prefer literary fiction instead. A survey in December confirmed that novels in general are getting bigger: the average number of pages in a bestseller, it found, had grown by 25% since 1999. This is unexpected. Digital culture was always supposed to fragment our attention spans, eroding our powers of concentration with addictive interruptions and bite-sized stimuli – and it often does. But it’s also the case that e-readers make very long books much more practical: the 400-plus pages of Smith’s Eye of the Tiger (in which, by the way, a killer shark is destroyed by being induced to swallow a stick of gelignite hidden inside the body of a Moray eel) added no weight to my Kindle.
I also have technology to thank for my favourite very long discovery of the year – not a novel but a podcast, entitled Hardcore History, presented by an American former radio host named Dan Carlin. Episodes frequently run for almost four hours. In one sequence of shows, Carlin tells the story of the first world war, from a momentous shooting in Sarajevo all the way to Armistice Day. To listen to the whole thing at once would take just under a full day, from midnight to midnight. And here’s what happens during all those hours: Carlin talks. That’s it.
There is something almost inexpressibly appealing about this, in an era when almost all other content – articles, podcasts, videos, TV shows – arrives doing jazz hands, anxiously soliciting the reader’s or listener’s or viewer’s attention by means of outrageous headlines or self-conscious gimmicks, in a determined effort to make things seem more interesting than, on inspection, they turn out to be. Listening to Carlin talking about the first world war is compelling because the first world war is compelling, and because Carlin is an accomplished storyteller. The same is true of another 2015 discovery, You Must Remember This, a podcast on Hollywood history expertly narrated by the film critic Karina Longworth. Relaxing in the safe hands of these talented talkers, I became aware of how much of the rest of my media-consumption time, these days, is spent braced against attention-grabbing gambits. I’ve developed the habit of clicking warily, knowing from bitter experience how often the promise made in the headline isn’t kept by the article, video or programme to which it leads. Another glorious exception to the rule is the New York Review of Books: its acres of dense text make no desperate efforts to lure me in, and, precisely as a consequence of this, I’m lured.
But back to the opposite end of the highbrow/lowbrow scale: airport thrillers. The objection could be raised, I suppose, that they’re really just clickbait in book form; you read on because you need to find out if the hero, hanging by his fingernails to the edge of the canyon, will pull himself to safety and a slug of whisky – or will the gaboon adder triumph again? (The critic Miles Donald, reviewing another of Smith’s novels, put it perfectly: “I wanted to know what happened next even when I didn’t care.”) Yet even here, in works of pure escapism, the sheer length of the books give rise to a unity of concentration on the part of the reader that feels increasingly rare. Perhaps one ironic result of the culture of distraction and interruption will be to send us, like stranded hikers spotting the mountain rescue team, scrambling back to focus.
No more President Pataki
This week, George Pataki abandoned his campaign for the US presidency, prompting two importantquestions: “Wait, was George Pataki running for president?” and, relatedly, “Who’s George Pataki, again?” These are inauspicious times for moderate Republicans, and the former governor of New York state frequently found himself polling 0% of potential primary voters: on graphs representing the race, his support was indistinguishable from the X axis. The real mystery, as ever, is not why he quit, but what keeps no-hope candidates going as long as they do. A shot at the vice-presidency is part of the answer. It can also be a route to a media career and book sales; a way to promote a cause; or, for younger candidates, a path to subsequent success. For the 70-year-old Pataki, though, it was hard not to see something more personal at play. Having several times flirted with running, it seemed he couldn’t face the rest of his life without the knowledge that, however comically long the odds, he’d finally tried.
Increasingly, I find this psychological lens the only bearable one through which to watch the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Donald Trump the nominee has been already been a disaster for US political debate. But Trump the man, driven by – well, driven by what? – remains compelling. His private demons are everywhere on display, as when he described Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break in the last Democratic debate as “disgusting”, or speculated on her ability to “satisfy her husband”. He is, one can only assume, a deeply unhappy man, unfulfilled by wealth or celebrity, who hopes political triumph might finally fill the inner chasm. Then there’s Ben Carson, apparently both a hugely talented former neurosurgeon and, in several other ways, an idiot; that these might coexist in one person is fascinating. Rick Santorum’s rictus grin at every debate communicates undiluted terror. Whose voice is it, in his head, telling him he must put himself through such agony? Clearly, running for president is a form of therapy by other means for these people, and probably not a very effective one. The rest of us, collectively, are the therapists. We have nine more months of this. It’s a pity we can’t charge a fee.
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